One of the objectives of the Open Access movement is to establish institutional repositories at universities and other research institutions in order to support self-archiving. Although a lot of software solutions have already been presented in recent years they lack a seamless integration of authoring tools, support for authors, and other technical publication tools. This paper presents a formal approach to describe software components applied in publishing processes. Additionally it is depicted how this formal description leads to the technological basis for SCOPE (Service Core for Open Publishing Environments) – a publishing platform for XML based publishing models. SCOPE is a framework intended for the integration of different publication components into a single platform.